Sheboygan loves trees, and gets honored for it with another 'Tree City USA' award

One of the new crimson spire English oak trees planted Friday, April 27, 2018, in Deland Park in Sheboygan, Wis. The city was honored that day with a “Tree City USA” title from the national Arbor Day Foundation, and was Wisconsin’s first city to earn the title 40 years ago.(Photo: McLean Bennett/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)Buy Photo

It’s a question Olivia Witthun usually asks the classes of young children she meets with to talk about trees. But on a windy, chilly Friday morning at Sheboygan’s lakeside Deland Park, the state urban forestry coordinator’s audience was considerably older.

Still, the roughly three-dozen Sheboygan city workers and Rotary Club members knew to raise their hands.

“The point is,” said Witthun, who works for the state Department of Natural Resources, “we all live in a forest. It’s right here where we live.”

Moments later, she handed Sheboygan’s mayor a small plaque cementing the city’s status as Wisconsin’s longest-running tree-loving city. Sheboygan has held the title “Tree City USA” for 40 years, longer than any other community in Wisconsin, where today nearly 200 cities boast the status bestowed by the national Arbor Day Foundation.

Sheboygan is in the midst of an arboreal transformation. Just as in the 1960s and ’70s, when a tree-killing disease wiped out many of the city’s once-ubiquitous Dutch elms, an invasion of green beetles today is threatening Sheboygan’s stock of ash trees.

Sheboygan had more than 5,000 of those trees as recently as six years ago, said public works director David Biebel. But a looming threat of the encroaching emerald ash borer, an invasive species known for wiping out whole forests of ash trees, prompted the city at the time to begin taking preemptive measures to ward off the bug.

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Sheboygan Mayor Mike Vandersteen helps plant one of the new crimson spire English oak trees Friday, April 27, 2018, in Deland Park in Sheboygan, Wis. The city was honored that day with a “Tree City USA” title from the national Arbor Day Foundation, and was Wisconsin’s first city to earn the title 40 years ago.(Photo: McLean Bennett/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

The city removed some of its ash trees and has worked to preserve the ones that have remained. But speakers with both the DNR and the city who addressed Friday’s small crowd repeatedly brought up the ongoing need to address the threat.

Ashes once comprised a quarter of all the trees in Sheboygan, Biebel said after Friday’s ceremony, which he attended and where one speaker collegially referred to him as Sheboygan’s “Lorax” — the titular tree-loving character in a Dr. Seuss book by the same name.

Funding for the city’s tree operations, which besides cutting down old and planting new trees also involves trimming and pruning, comes in part from the city’s budget. Other dollars come from grants and donations: local Rotary Club members, whose organization has taken an interest globally in planting more trees, delivered a more-than $14,000 check to the city Friday.

The city in recent years has cut down an average of 300 to 500 trees a year — not all of them ashes, Biebel said. Only now is it trying to catch up with the canopy loss by planting as many trees as it’s lost, he explained.

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One of the new crimson spire English oak trees planted Friday, April 27, 2018, in Deland Park in Sheboygan, Wis. The city was honored that day with a “Tree City USA” title from the national Arbor Day Foundation, and was Wisconsin’s first city to earn the title 40 years ago.(Photo: McLean Bennett/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

Two new trees planted at Friday’s ceremony will help the city replace the trees it has lost. The crimson spire English oak trees, now in Deland Park, could someday grow about 50 feet high, said city forestry worker Kenny Meinnert.

“I want to diversify the numbers of trees,” Meinnert said, referencing past die-offs that affected Sheboygan’s ash and Dutch elm trees and noting that a variety in the city’s canopy could help avoid similar problems in the future.